ABSTRACT
An ethically neutral statement can be ideologically biased. Marx. H. Sidgwick, although he outlived Jevons, paid no attention to marginal utility theory. And any change in the political climate associated with the rise of marginalism, T. W. Hutchison continues, was a conciliatory change rather than a reactionary one. Hutchison’s contention that ideological factors played second string in the marginal revolution, being neither a necessary nor a sufficient cause, is true, important and salutary. Although the marginal revolution came too soon to have been engineered as a ‘bourgeois’ answer to Marxism, neoclassical doctrines did come to be wielded explicitly against Marx. The important point is that there was little conscious inclination among English economists to use marginal analysis actively as a weapon against Marxism. Nor is there any correlation between enthusiasm for marginalism and distaste for Marx.
